


A Fundamental Difference

by Chaifootsteps



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Anode is trans and Arcee is not., Autistic Character, Canon Trans Character, Failing relationship, Fix-It, Gender Dysphoria, M.Scott!Arcee, Nonbinary Character, Nonconsensual sex change, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-retcon Arcee, The most personal and precious thing I've ever written.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:34:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24599857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaifootsteps/pseuds/Chaifootsteps
Summary: After the final battle is won, Arcee lets something slip.Happy pride.
Relationships: Aileron/Arcee (Transformers), Anode/Lug (Transformers)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	A Fundamental Difference

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Arcee's not sure what possess him to tell her the truth, quite honestly. Something weird in the air, maybe, hanging on for dear life between the sunshine and the smell of the rubble. Maybe the fact that she’s human, and if he regrets this, they won’t have to spend the next three million years awkwardly looking at each other.

…No, that’s not entirely it. If you want to know the real truth of the matter, he's running on the same philosophy that’s guided him all his life, and served him well maybe one time for every twenty. He's telling her now because it just seems like something that makes sense.

“I was forged male. Someone named Jhiaxus claimed he could help me look less like my twin brother. He got me into his lab, strapped me down for ‘my own safety,’ and then, when he had me where he wanted me, got to work altering my CNA.”

Her eyes widen, and that could mean any number of things are poised to come out of her mouth. Arcee carries on before they can.

“Said he wanted a return to the old days, to reintroduce gender into our race. He talked a lot…I mean, it obviously takes more than one session, something like that. I was drugged for maybe a quarter of it, but I remember the moment…the _exac_ t moment when I caught onto what was happening to my body. And I remember, I just…begged for him to stop. Over and over again, until he got tired of it, or was just worried about me ruining my vocalizer. And I remember that too, the sound of my voice changing. When it was all over, I woke up in a dingy travel suite, and everyone I met was calling me she.”

He look down at his hands. Little scar in the silver protoformal metal that's been there forever. Easier than looking over at her.

“...I put a blaster in my mouth, at one point. And just left it there for a few kliks. But if I did that, who was going to stop Jhiaxus? So here I am.”

He waits for a response, and when one doesn't come, knows with absolute certainty he's going to regret revealing this. But when he finally does glance over, half expecting to see that she's walked away, he finds her holding just a little too tight to the safety bar. Her face is pale, eyes sick.

“... _Holy shit_.”

***

  
  


Much to his surprise, she doesn’t make an excuse to be anywhere else, then turn around to quickly pretend to go there. Neither does she take that old perennial Cybertronian chestnut of changing the subject, and never bringing it up again no matter how many millennia go by. Her first question is:

“Does anyone else know?”

“I think most of them do. They don’t care, but they know.”

“Does…I mean…”

“No. Aileron doesn’t know.”

She exhales. A slow, quick breath.

“Arcee…you’ve got to tell someone about this.”

“I just told you, Ail–”

“No, no, Arcee, _please_ tell me you’ve gotten help for this. Like, _actual help._ There’s got to be someone in the universe who offers it.”

“Probably, but I've never met them. The Lost Light had a mech, but I got the sense that he was booked pretty solid.”

“I don't really know you, and you don't really know me, and I get it, that's fine. That's totally fine. But Arcee, you've got to believe me...that's the most fucked up thing I've ever heard. And I've been around.”

“My life’s been full of things I’d rather didn’t happen,” he says with a shrug, and right on schedule, is wishing he'd never said anything at all. “Anyway, I'm not going to kill myself or anyone else, so you don't have to worry about that.”

“I'm not worried about _that,_ I'm worried about you! You, here, now! No one deserves to have to live with that.” Even Arcee, who's terrible at reading people, gets the sense she's juggling a lot of unsaid things. Her hand flits around like an addled scraplet, finally settling on the railing. “I'm just...Okay. I'm sorry. That was pushy of me.”

“No worries.”

“Thank you. For even telling me.”

Arcee, who is in some ways a woefully weak mech, sighs very deeply.

“…Fine, fine. Fine. I’ll tell Aileron. Okay?”

Apparently Marissa knows him just well enough to know that’s as good as she’s getting out of him.

  
  


***

He doesn’t tell Aileron, of course. But in his defense, she’s not around.

He toys with the idea of doing it over the comm channel, so he can’t see the look on her face. But then she rings him up a day and a half later, voice crackling with excitement over the new space slime the crew’s discovered and how a colony world only tried to kill them a little, and how she’s added an unspecified token to the “Arcee bag” she always cobbles together for him on long voyages, and he can’t bring himself to do anything that yanks her back down.

Between Windblade and Pyra Magna, he’s let himself be convinced that he’s something other than a broken abomination. That's a start, isn't it? That's enough? And he'd really like to _keep on_ feeling that way, and he knows if he tells Aileron the truth, if it turns out he's not what Aileron wants...

She’s the sunniest relationship he’s ever been in. She's practically the _only_ relationship he's ever been in. She calls him a tough lady, tells him how much she loves the shape of his face, and the swoop of his waist, and the softness of his lips, and if she’s ever wondered why he insists on fragging with the lights dimmed, she never brings it up. Scrap, they frag so much less than she would like.

...He can’t do it.

No way can he do it.

Prowl loved him exactly like he was. And look how that turned out.

***

He drafts up the message to Anode, telling himself that it will feel like he's making some substantial progress even if he never sends it. It's not even a proper explanation of what's going on.

_Hey, this is out of the blue and crazy, but I think you might be the only one I can talk to about something important._

True to form, he sits and stares at it for half an hour, wondering if any part of it is wrong, because he's Arcee of the Darklands and every other sentence that's ever left his mouth has been wrong. If it's too vague, too creepy, too informal...

And still, for a moment, his finger hovers over the screen of that scratched datapad, burning to drop down...

_("You don’t even know you’re doing it, do you?”_

_"Doing what?"  
  
“_ _**She,** _ _” he says, teeth gritted so hard it toes the line of pain. Spat out like poison.)_

...No. Stupid, insulting even, to insinuate their experiences are anywhere close to comparable.

He drafts it away and goes to berth kicking himself for ever considering it in the first place.

  
  


***

  
  


He dreads what Marissa will say to him the next time they cross paths, a week later. She finds him heaving armfuls of twisted street metal into the back of a disposal truck, like a human clearing branches from the lawn in spring.

“You know,” she informs him, “the cranes’ll be by tomorrow. You probably actually _could_ get away with leaving this one to us.”

“It’s fine. Gives me something to do with my hands,” Arcee says, which is his way of saying it feels like the opposite of Antilla. “How’s Thundercracker?”

“He and his dog made it through in one piece. So never better.”

It's one less thing to worry about, and that always picks him up, having one less thing to worry about. And so he sends the message to Anode, part of him hoping she never responds.

When three days go by and hasn't, his fuel pump stops dropping out whenever he checks his HUD. He stops dreading the ping of it, stops feeling sick when he pulls it up in the morning.

If he were her, he probably would have ignored him too.

  
  


***

Aileron comes home a little early, and kisses him like it’s been longer.

She eagerly shows him the contents of the Arcee Bag; polish from Lithon, a bottle of whatever those mechanical stick people drink, and the one she's most proud of, an interesting chunk of bark that turns pink when the light hits it just right. Arcee wonders if it's normal to feel so loved.

“You didn't have to do all that for me. My cycle would have been made if you just brought me the polish. Or you know, just you.”

Aileron waves his concerns off, literally. “You make me happy, I bring you scrap I find on the ground.”

“What did I ever do to deserve you?”

(Aside from kiss her on the mouth without asking. He's apologized profusely for that one.)

They watch some Earth program about baby birds that throw themselves off of cliffs onto piles of jagged rocks. She settles against him, little arms curled comfortably around his waist. She tells him something precious. His intake is tight as he says something precious in return.

When she sleeps, his hands shake.  
  


_Liar._

_  
Liar._

_**  
Liar.** _

***

Anode messages him back.

_Sure. Just name a time and place that works for you._

He procrastinates for four days on an answer that seems appropriate. If it's too crowded, his panic alarms are going to go off and he's going to run, and anyway, no one in their right mind would take him up on an invitation to meet him somewhere isolated. All the while, he's keenly aware that there have to be at least a thousand different things she'd rather be doing than discussing his baggage, which he's _still_ not certain isn't going to offend her. How do you tell someone that you hate being the thing they worked so hard to become with every last scrap of your being? What is he even supposed to say?

Hey, Anode, we're nothing alike and deep down I resent you a little but you're the closest thing and my only option?

He finally settles on the rooftop over The Rising Sign, which is the safest spot he can think of without asking her to meet him in the middle of the Cybertronian wilderness. It's well lit. Sometimes they offer phosphorus drops.

_Perfect. See you then._

***

The Rising Sign sells Engex in exactly one color, blue, and never stopped to think that offering rooftop seating downwind from a place that smelts blaster iron might not be the best choice, fiduciary wise. If it's like any of the other venues in this part of Cybertron, it will eventually burn down mysteriously and the owners will set up shop a few blocks down, selling Engex in exactly two colors.

But the tables come in nooks and it's a good place to have a conversation. The rooftop is empty when he arrives, and still empty when Anode strides in through the lift.

She orders an Engex. Tells him he's looking better since the last time they met; he tells her she is too. She plucks her drink from the hover tray, takes a sip, pulls an unimpressed face.

“Tastes like it feels when you put your hand in something wet.” Arcee doesn't know what to say to that, so he chuckles awkwardly. “So. You had something on your mind.”

“I mean...you can probably hazard a guess.”

“Ahh. The thing?”

“Yeah. The thing.” He sighs, feeling stupid already, fiddling uselessly with the first whorl of a name scratched into the table. “I don't know where to begin.”

“That's fine.”

“I'm afraid I'm going to say something crazy insensitive.”

“That's fine too. No stupid questions rule is in effect.” says Anode. “I've got absolutely nowhere to be, so start wherever you want and take as long as you want.”

And so Arcee does.

He starts at Galvatron, first and foremost. How he loved his brother, how they used to run wild and unchecked, stealing fuel where they had to and jumping other newbuilds when it seemed like they deserved it. How they'd fight, grapple to the point of leaking fuel, then laugh and keep each other warm in whatever makeshift berth they'd cobbled together. The arenas, and how it killed him to watch Galvatron change for the worst even as he knew he was changing too. How he still comes online in the middle of the night, his spark reaching out plaintively for its other half.

Anode never tells him to get to the point. For that, he almost trusts her right then and there.

When he begins to talk about Jhiaxus, he can't talk about anything else. He tells her everything he told to Marissa. And then, like energon bubbling up under a bad mesh patch until it swells and pops, he tells her everything in between. The smell of the lab, of his own peeling paint as the pink coating set in, or the first time Jhiaxus slipped a cable into the port of his arm, how hard he tried to jerk it away before the tip caught and slipped home and threw up lines and lines and lines of text as the insidious foreign programs went to work. His conflicting feelings on the moments when Jhiaxus would sedate him.

By the time he gets to the only escape attempt that ever came close to succeeding – so close he could smell the fresh air from the door at the end of the hallway – his optics are brimming with static.

“I trusted him. He knew my brother, and he just understood completely why I just couldn't go on with people mistaking me for Galvatron. He said...” Arcee pauses, a bitter laugh catching in his throat and never quite escaping. “Said we were going to have me walking out of that door looking like a brand new bot.”

“Fragger,” says Anode, softly and without heat.

He goes on and on. Feels himself skipping around the timeline. The years of hunting Jhiaxus that blurred together, then his time under Optimus, then back to Jhiaxus's claws gripping his helm, and then a side diversion to point out all the times in the beginning when he'd corrected bots on their pronoun usage, something they either weren't physically capable of obliging or just refused to and how he doesn't know which was worse.

“You wanna know my favorite way I ever killed him?”

“Tell me.”

“I told him to call me what I was. That if he could use the right pronouns, I'd let him go forever. Pack up my sword and never bother him again.”

“I'm guessing he couldn't.”

Arcee's chuckle chills even his own fuel. “He was choking on every syllable. Lubricant running down his mouth and everything. And no, he couldn't do it. So I force fed him one of my swords. Simple as that.”

Anode takes a slow pull off her Engex, the taste of wetness and all.

Arcee does not so much reach the end as stumble upon it with halting steps. His intake is dry as a bone, his jaw aching. Every time he begins to feel that there isn't a kick left in him, he remembers something that's always been there, waiting to be said. Even as his shoulders hunch, depleted and battered, there is a sense in him that there will always be something left.

Anode's voice comes to him, somehow intimately close and yet so very far away. “You want a regular cube?”

Arcee can't even muster up the strength to second guess an act of kindness. He nods. The cube comes, and he drinks it without ever quite tasting it. As he picks it up, he realizes how badly his hands are shaking.

“Arcee?” Anode asks, steady, gentle. “I'm gonna ask you something that's probably going to sound really insulting given everything you just told me. But bear with me, all right?”

“...Okay.”

“Do _you_ consider yourself female?”

It hurts, but not the fact that she's asking.

“I don't.”

“Then you aren't. Done. Okay? No matter what else we talk about, even if we stop right here, I want you to hold tight to that. _You_ decide who you are. Not me, not Jhiaxus, not Optimus. It's all you.” It's the simplest thing, and yet Arcee practically buckles where he sits, optics burning all over again.

“I'm sorry. It's not...it's so important that you know I don't have anything against it. You. Lug.”

“What? Being female or reclassifying?”

“Both. Either.”

“I mean, I _appreciate_ that. But me and Lug, we...okay, I don't want to say we _chose_ this, because it's not something you choose, but everything that came after? That was _our_ choice. And the choice was everything. We're not the same, Arcee. And there's not a damn thing wrong with that.”

Arcee feels like he should be meeting her optics right now, but he can hardly meet Aileron's on a good day. He lifts his head to look up at her, as best he can manage. “How did you know?”

“Me?” She stops and thinks it over, playing with the rim of her cube, little clinks against the table. “I think it just kind of crept up on me. I think, maybe, I always knew, but it wasn't until we were out there among the stars and there were a million and a half different ways to be...Lug settled on one before I did, and I sort of dabbled in between until I finally decided that yeah, okay, this one fits. This feels right.”

“Did you ever have doubts?” Arcee ventures, knowing he's on dangerous ground. “Like maybe you were just completely off the mark?”

Anode, thankfully, doesn't take offense. “Oh Primus, all the time. You wonder if you've got some issue going on, and this is your way of dealing with it. Or you meet someone who knew you before and your new pronouns just sound so wrong coming out of their mouth, and you're like 'Oh, slag, am I just playing pretend here?'” She shakes her head, a touch of a smile playing on her lip components. “But then you imagine going back and it's like no, not a chance, that'd be like cutting off a leg. And who cares if I _do_ find something more fitting down the line? Last I checked, there was no limit per customer to how many times you can learn something about yourself. Mind your own business.”

Arcee drops his head again. “Sometimes I feel like I'm the one who's in the wrong. Like maybe Jhiaxus knew something I didn't, and my whole life, I've been lashing out against what I was always meant to be.”

“Does this feel like what you were always meant to be?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go!” Again, like it's the easiest thing. Like the way home is really just that simple. “Arcee, he operated on you against your will. You were right to step on his head. It sounds like you knew exactly who you were, and he took that from you. He _stole it_ from you.”

“What if the whole thing was just...bad meds?”

For the first time, Anode looks affronted.

“Bad _what?_ Who the hell told you that?”

“I honestly don't know.”

Anode huffs, her wings twitching irritably. “Transitioning's a whole lot of things, yeah, and even more if you're organic. But for Pit's sake, it doesn't trigger a _murder spree_. Anyone tells you it does, you run.”

“...Gotcha.”

Anode leans into her elbows with a soft sigh. “Okay. Forget Jhiaxus for a minute. Forget what you're 'supposed' to do or feel or whatever. If you could be anything, if you could wave a magic wand right now, this second, what would you choose for yourself?”

Arcee takes a very long time to reply, and Anode does not begrudge him this. A better world, for starters. His brother back, wiser for the wear. Hardhead and Sterling. Prowl. But that's not what she's really asking, he thinks, and anyhow, it's not the answer that leaps to the forefront.

“...My old frame back. Not the way it was, exactly, but the way I dreamed going in to meet Jhiaxus. My old face.” No horns, a sleeker frame. He always used to dream of sunset red. “I don't want to be female, but I'm not sure I want to be male either, not the way it works on Earth. I loved the way 'he' and 'him' sounded...I loved when they were an easy default. They just meant that you existed.”

“You know, for what it's worth, you _can_ opt out of the whole gender thing.”

“...Wait, really?”

“Oh yeah. You can do it and still keep 'he' and 'him', if that's what you want.” The trace of skepticism he feels must make it to his face, because she smirks again. “Seriously. You might confuse a couple of humans, but once you get out there beyond the Chaar belt? They play crazy fast and loose with gender and no gender and pronouns and everything. It's not a big deal at all.”

“... _Huh_.” Arcee, in a creeping way, begins to feel very old. Almost hopeful too, and just like always, something slithers up from him to quash it. “I mean, I'm not sure it matters. Like I said before, I've asked around to see if any of this could be reversed. Six million years of bots blowing by my pronouns, I can't see why they'd start now.”

“Well, one step at a time, you know? It's a big, wide world of scientists out there, anything can happen, everything's changing. That you're telling anyone about this at _all_ is progress. You should be proud of that. And that's not a platitude, that's the truth.”

Arcee holds out a trickle of optimism that he will be, at some later time. The pain, the ugliness, and the bitter, bitter sense of a wasted life has never been stronger within him; stirred it up and brought to the surface, until he's slick with the sourness of it. As he rubs his throbbing temples, he doesn't feel proud...just aching and exhausted. “I miss me. Maybe the me before was violent and broken and worthless, and...and maybe I was never any better than Galvatron, but Primus, _Primus._ I just wish I could go back in time and _be_ him again.”

His optics are brimming over again, he's crying like a big stupid newbuild, and the only thing that soothes his shattered dignity is the fact that Anode's are shining as well.

“Arcee...”

“I'm an old mech now, Anode. I've spent my whole _life_ just existing in this frame that isn't me. I'm never, ever going to get that time back. If I don't tell myself I deserved it all, what's left for me?”

“Everything,” Anode says, shaking, but steady enough that Arcee clings to it like a spar. “I know it doesn't seem like it now, but do you see all of that rebuilding happening? How it's just so thick, and ugly and caked on, and you think there's no way they can pave over all that loss, and yeah, they can't...but then suddenly, there's just life pouring out? A lot of times, that's how going forward looks. And I think that's how your way forward is going to be. I really do.”

Arcee presses his fist to his forehead.

“I don't know if you're a huggy kind of mech...” Anode ventures.

“Not really.”

“Okay.”

“...Frag it. Yes. Please.”

She holds out her arms and Arcee doesn't think about how much he'll regret his own display of vulnerability later. He falls into her embrace, and when her arms lock around behind him, he curls inwards, lets them be the vault doors that keep out the world. There, in the dark green-black ink that swallows him up when he presses his optics too close to her plating, he mourns long and bitter for himself. For all that that gray and red mech with pale dust on his plates became, and all he did not.

Even after he quiets, his vents continue to chop away at the air noisily. He lacks the strength to straighten, and Anode doesn't let go.

“...Still with me?”

“More or less.”

“Good stuff.”

Self-consciousness creeping in, Arcee eases away from her, scrubbing frantically at his optics. Clutching at the fragments of himself that seem to be everywhere.

“Sorry about that.”

“Why?” responds Anode, dragging a hand across the places where her own cheeks are noticeably damp. “If I were in your place, I'd probably be doing that at least once a day.”

Arcee doesn't know why that gets a weak chuckle out of him.“I might be a little messed up.”

“Aren't we all? The moons are creeping over the horizon. Anode's wings stretch and settle across her back, readjusting themselves, and Arcee tries to pin down what the dizzy detachment he's feeling is called. It's not quite a lightness, or a sense of feeling better, exactly. Honestly, the closest thing he can compare it to is the purging session that comes after swallowing something noxious. “So. Should I tell Lug that it's he and him with you all the way?”

“Tell her, but give me a week. I just don't want Aileron to be the last to know.” Anode nods, and Arcee, suddenly remembering his untouched cup of Engex is there, raises it to his lips, only to stop halfway. His voice, spoken over the rim, is eerily zen. “...I don't think I'm in love with Aileron.”

“Oh, _mech._ ”

“I don't! I'm sorry!”

“I know, I know! I'm not laughing at you, it's just...Primus, the universe can't cut you a break, can it?”

“Or maybe I am in love with her. I have no idea. Everything clicked into place with Prowl, and it never does when I'm with Aileron...I don't know if I'm into her or if I grabbed onto her because she was good to me and I figured I was never, ever going to do better than her.”

Anode gives a breezy click of the glossa, sucks a tight intake of air in through her cheek. “Well, _that_ you're going to have to talk out with Aileron. Because I'm just gonna be honest with you, I got lucky with Lug. I don't trust any advice I give you not to be bad. But they _do_ say if you have to ask...”

“Yeah.” Arcee sighs a long sigh.“I know.

“I think it's gonna be fine if you're just straightforward with her. And on the off-chance it isn't? We'll meet up here again for round two. We can throw Lug at you – she gives pretty solid relationship advice.”

His chronometer has to be lying about the hour. Arcee looks at her and feels as though they've crossed several mountains together.

“Thank you. For all of this.”

She waves it off, quite literally. “Nah, it's all good. I'm just telling you what everyone should have been telling you all these years. Just remember, you deserve good things. And you _will_ find a way to become your most authentic self.”

Arcee takes both into his spark and wraps them up, something precious and irreplaceable. “Got it.”

Anode is goes quiet for a time, and Arcee suspects that she's waiting to see if he's done bleeding out. But he is, and when he indicates this with a wan smile and the weakest thumbs up ever known to human or mech, she raises her Engex. “Hey. Frag dysphoria?”

Arcee raises his, properly this time.“Frag dysphoria.”

Their cubes clink. They down both, and find them warm and settled from sitting untouched for hours.

Arcee can only laugh.

“...Oh damn. It _does_ taste like a hand in something wet!”

***

That night, Arcee collapses into berth like a dead thing, and when he wakes, it's late afternoon and the afternoon sun is burning orange across the construction zones. His helm feels stuffed with sand and grit. He can't remember if he dreamed or not.

They won't be expecting him out there; he called off ahead of time, foreseeing that however his discussion with Anode was going to pan out, it wasn't going to leave him feeling up to facing the world. He contemplates going out anyway, just to have something to do, and draws an oil bath instead. And while the lapping softness of the steaming cleanser together with the memory of Anode's words the night before do nothing to gentle his feelings towards this frame he exists in – the dip in his waist and the hated, hated softness of his lips – in the warmth and quiet, he feels the steady hum of something intangible, something more than plates or scars or even CNA. It rises to the surface like sentio metallico, nameless but familiar, and he runs his fingers through it. And it occurs to him, just the very softest of revelations, that maybe there are still places within him where Jhiaxus never touched.

The next day, he runs into Marissa again. Not on the walkways, but in passing by cement mixers huddle together.

“So,” he says, which seems as good a start as any. “I talked to someone.”

Marissa looks pleasantly surprised. He figures she's right to be so. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Not anyone professional or anything, but...I think if nothing else, I might have made a friend?”

“That'll happen,” she chuckles. “So how do you feel?”

Arcee leans on the wall as he combs for his answer, and watches distant helicopters buzzing in and out.

“Like I'm a little less caged.”

Marissa sighs. Pats the railing, because she knows better than to pat his arm. Smiles just a little too knowingly.

“Welcome to recovery, Arcee. Coffee's on the table.”

Arcee doesn't get the joke. For once, he feels like maybe that's okay.

***

It rains during the night, and when he steps outside the next morning, the world smells aerated and alive. He's always loved the way the rain smells on Earth, how it doesn't burn if you put a hand out into it, how it rinses everything it touches clean. He sits there for a time, cycling it. Just for a while, his spark at peace.

And he knows that if he doesn't do it then, he never will.

Deep intake.

Enter the numbers, delete them. Enter the numbers, delete them. Enter the numbers...

_'You can do this, Arcee. You're a battering ram. And you can do this.'_

“Hey, Aileron? Are you free to meet today? It's...it's actually pretty important.”


End file.
